


a safe place to land

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Animals, Engagement, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25080802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: “I don’t know that animals converse the way we do,” says Marianne. She looks at Claude’s image in the mirror: at the places where his own hair falls into his face, at the familiar angle of his bent neck, edged in lamplight. “But if they live around each other long enough, they start to be able to understand each other. The meaning of the sounds they make, and their movements… It’s a different sort of language, I suppose.”Marianne makes herself at home.
Relationships: Marianne von Edmund/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 21
Kudos: 76





	a safe place to land

**Author's Note:**

> AKA Wyvern Lore as Metaphor for L???????: The Fic.
> 
> I have a small mental collection of various all-over-the-timeline Mariclaudes that I want to complete, just for myself, before my time running the FE3H track is done. Naturally I had to start with the hardest one.
> 
> Many thanks to Gwen, as ever, for looking this over, and for Seeing it.
> 
> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OJMOTe56tE)

The first time she ever saw an Almyran wyvern, Marianne had had her eyes on the ground. In Zanado, on the rocky path cut into the mountainside. She remembers it, even years later—the pebbles and dust loosening and sliding away under one cautious foot, the scrubby grass, and the cry. The shrieking, far overhead, coming down so loud it echoed between the cliffs. Dorte had shied beside her, and stepped back, dislodging more stones.

Claude was there, even if she and Dorte had been walking at the rear of the column. The packhorse and his keeper, watching everyone’s backs. That was the way of things as they’d been taught it in the classroom. The house leader was meant to walk up front with the professor, and yet somehow Claude had appeared on the other side of Dorte’s head, one hand on his neck, coaxing him to be still.

“Whoa, boy, whoa! Steady. Steady now. It’s just the sky watch, you see? Nothing to be scared of."

Nothing to be scared of, and yet Marianne’s searching eyes had still gone up, and even with the wind blowing her hair into her face she could see the pair of sharp black silhouettes outlined against the pale clouds, circling and gliding. Here, the long sweep of a wing outstretched. There, the glimmer of sunlight off burnished armor, the edges of javelins.

When she came back down, she saw Claude had his head up too, watching them. And then he looked at her eye to eye over Dorte’s neck and grinned.

“Curious, are you, Marianne? Want to ask Teach to train you to fly?”

“No, thank you,” said Marianne, gaze to the ground again. “I’m afraid of falling.”

“I see,” said Claude, and something else, quieter. The words had slipped by her, into the empty air, and she hadn’t thought at the time to ask for them again—hadn’t known how, back when it was easier to assume that no one’s words were ever really meant for her, in the end.

It was easier, then, not to listen too close. It would not be until many years later, traversing a different array of mountains, that she found her way back to this day in memory, and heard _That makes two of us._

* * *

It’s nearly nightfall, and the sun is sinking slowly over the paddock behind the palace, and Marianne is two steps out the gate when she hears Dorte whinny. When she glances over her shoulder, he’s prancing in the grass with his head high, back and forth in loose circles. His eyes are on the sky.

It’s a few days yet until the end of spring, but she’s found the Almyran summer eager to announce itself; the sky above the meadow is bluer lately, warmer, slower to darken. Marianne can see the heat moving in the air, too, in the late afternoons—can see the freckles on her arms, and the white flowers on the wayfarer tree, and the restless wind, blowing down from the mountains to the west. On the other side of those mountains, in Fódlan, the roses may have started blooming already.

There’s a second whinny, longer and louder than the first. Dorte’s never been a chatterbox; she can count on one hand the number of times she’s heard him call out like this, all these years, and only ever in times of great joy or danger. And yet she recognizes it anyway, rare as it is—the particular sound of his voice, pealing bell-like across the grass to where she stands, as if part of it comes out of her too.

So she turns. As Dorte starts to run, she sees the shadow growing long above him, follows the shape of it upwards—and Claude’s wyvern is there, beating her wings in a steady rhythm, coming down out of the sky with the sun.

“Oh,” she murmurs, one hand coming involuntarily up to her mouth, even if there’s no one around to hear. She turns, and draws close to the fence again, leaning gently against the rails. “Oh, Buttercup.”

On the far end of the paddock, near where the ground starts to slope upward toward the hills, Dorte stops, head still tipped up in expectation. Buttercup circles him a few more times, gradually, and descends, coming to rest on the grass. When she bends her neck toward him, their noses touch.

 _You don’t have to worry about her eating him,_ Claude had said once, watching her turn Dorte out to graze in the overgrown fields around Garreg Mach. It had been the middle of winter then, and Buttercup had been drowsing close by, curled up like a cat in a pool of watery sunshine, soaking up what she could of the day’s warmth. _She’s carried off a good few goats and even deer in her time, but horses are a bit of a tall order, if you know what I mean._

Marianne hadn’t been worried about it, and still isn’t, not really. All she’d felt then was a kind of grand and wordless awe, the kind of awe that stole your breath, seeing Buttercup completely at rest for the first time. The feeling has yet to fade, years later, more so because she can also count on one hand the number of times she’s seen a wyvern—any wyvern—at ease enough to come down to ground level of its own accord, and fold its wings.

They’re still chattering softly to each other, an exchange of chirps and whickers and gentle huffing noises, by the time Marianne turns to go. She shouldn’t be able to hear them at this distance, but the breezes carry the sound after her as she walks up the path, alone in the lavender twilight. Still listening.

* * *

Months before at Fódlan’s Locket, as they stood together atop the ramparts to watch the sun go down, Marianne had asked Lady Judith von Daphnel, “Have you ever seen wyverns in the wild?”

There were no soldiers posted on the walls that evening, and the cohort that Hilda had charged with accompanying them from House Goneril and into Almyra had already been whittled down as much as safety and courtesy both would allow. It was Judith herself who carried the lit torch up into the gathering dark, who fitted it into the sconce with her own hands. This was the way of things now. The war had been over nearly five years.

“Only once or twice, and not until I was a woman grown,” she said. “They only nest in high places, on the peaks or in caverns. And they’re surprisingly stealthy, for all their size—you can spend a week riding up and down the mountains and never see one, except in glimpses.”

Marianne reached down into the inside pocket of her cloak, feeling for the folded edges of the letter there, the rough length of twine encircling it. The late autumn sky was fading red along the horizon line, and all day there’d been a chill in the air that had made her put her hood up, portending an early first frost. Judith had joked more than once that they were racing the winter across the border, that the young king of Almyra and his lady-love might keep each other warm, and Marianne had surprised herself by laughing, more than once, without even having to second-guess it.

It had been a surprise to realize she was no longer afraid of Judith—not of her jokes, or her firm hand on the rein, or her appraising, steady eyes. It had been a surprise to realize she would have trusted Judith to accompany her into Almyra alone, under no armed guard at all, though she knew better than to say this aloud.

“Doubtless you’ll hear them, though,” she told Marianne, as she pulled her own cloak shut around her throat and stood by with her arms folded. “They’re always crying out to each other, up there. It can carry on the wind for leagues and leagues.”

And it was true. Marianne had not seen Almyra since her first journey across the border for the young king’s coronation, but she remembered the wild wyverns calling, like the beginning of something—like a thousand beginnings, all unfolding together.

That had been two years ago. The blue columbine had begun blooming wild again along the mountain paths, and even the sky had looked new.

“Why the interest, all of a sudden? Apart from the obvious, of course.”

There was a tilt to Judith’s mouth as she spoke, so slight she couldn’t be expected to answer for it. By the same token, Marianne did not say it was because she had been measuring their path in days—from her adoptive father’s house at Edmund to House Goneril, from Goneril to the Locket, from the Locket to white-towered Al-Alimah at the heart of Almyra, brilliant in the sun. She did not say that Claude’s last letter had found its way to her not overland but from the sky, tied to the leg of a hawk that had come down straight onto her fist, or that the words on it had been neat, suspiciously neat, as though the hand that wrote them had labored at it a long time. She did not say she had slept and woken with those words for the better part of a season, closer than her daily prayers, closer even than her name: _Khalid bin Iskandar writes to ask if Marianne of noble House Edmund wants him in her future._

“In Almyra, they say the first wyverns were the children of the east wind,” said Marianne, instead, to the night. “They say it was the wind that hollowed out caverns in the mountainsides for her children to live in, so that they would have a place to exist that was only theirs, between the heavens and the earth. Did you know that?”

Judith regarded her closely for a moment without answering. The red-gold light of the fire flickered down one side of her face, gently restless, disturbing the shadows that had settled there. Like wings.

“I did not,” she said.

* * *

Once, at what she now recognizes as the beginning, Marianne had asked Claude to teach her Almyran. Typically of Claude, his lessons have been the furthest thing from formal—a collection of little words recalled as they come to mind, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever, or so it seems. He gives her the word for _horse,_ the word for _prayer,_ the words for _water_ and _hungry_ and _morning._ He gives her numbers, and the months of the year. And just being here, he says, just living—that will take care of the rest.

Summer begins on a long and sultry Tuesday, and Marianne learns the word for _beautiful_ by accident, from behind a closed door. On the other side of it, her handmaidens are laughing, walking arm-in-arm down the hall. Claude, who had sent them off with assurances that his clumsy hands could manage taking down the lady’s hair, laughs, too, when he tells her what it means—and by some small miracle Marianne finds she can laugh at herself when she sees her image in the mirror, flushed ruby-red all the way down to her neck, the array of silver pins in her hair glimmering like stars.

With a little time, Marianne’s gotten used to the pins, and to braiding her hair down over her shoulder to let the seed pearls and the tiny crumbs of crystal on the heads catch the light. She’s gotten used to this room, with its small west-facing balcony, and the view of the golden grassland beyond the walls of Al-Alimah, and the mountains, and the moon. Set against these things, the way Claude smiles as her door clicks shut behind him is easy. The silence into which they settle in the evenings, undemanding of words in any language, is easier than anything.

“Did you know they… play together?” she asks him, six pins in. It’s a stray thought that’s been coming and going all week, rising comfortably to the surface now.

“Hm?” Claude murmurs, only half-listening, as he frees the last pin and deposits it with the others in her open palm. “Who?”

“Dorte,” Marianne says. “And Buttercup. I saw them a few days ago in the pasture.”

“Yeah?” Claude pauses then, partway through unbraiding her hair, as if to absorb this. He meets her eyes in the mirror, befuddled. “What were they doing?”

“He was running, and she was flying. Around and around, like this.” She gestures in loose circles, slowly. Around and around. “And then she came down to the ground, and they touched noses. I left them like that, since it was getting dark.”

Claude hums again, thoughtfully, and returns to his work. Marianne watches her hair come down in waves, over her shoulders and down the back of her chair, unraveling gently in his hands. It’s already grown a little, in the months since she left her adoptive father’s house. Perhaps she might let it continue.

“All the way down to the ground, huh,” he says, after a while. “Do you think they’re talking, when they do things like that? Is that, you know, something that happens?”

“I don’t know that animals converse the way we do,” says Marianne. She looks at Claude’s image in the mirror: at the places where his own hair falls into his face, at the familiar angle of his bent neck, edged in lamplight. “But if they live around each other long enough, they start to be able to understand each other. The meaning of the sounds they make, and their movements… It’s a different sort of language, I suppose.”

Claude leans toward the dresser for the comb. As he does so, one of his hands finds its way to her shoulder, thumb against the bare skin of her nape, resting there.

“A different sort of language,” he murmurs—and then laughs again, quiet and wondering. “I like the sound of that.”

* * *

“Don’t be shy,” says Nader on Friday morning, hefting a grey egg the size of a melon in one hand. “They’re hardy things, these eggs. They’ll take being rolled around a little just fine.”

They had left the palace for the wyvern breeding grounds before dawn, to beat the sun. Marianne had risen easily, as is still her habit most mornings, part of her half-waiting for a knock at the door, for the tolling of a distant bell that never comes—still so attuned to the possibility of being needed somewhere. But it had been rather nice, in its own way, to feel her way through her wardrobe in the half-light, and bypass all her new courtly finery for a pair of worn canvas jodhpurs and the oldest boots she owned. What a strange blessing, so comfortable and so comforting, to still have cause to put on clothes she wouldn’t have to fret about ruining later.

The palace wyverns nest in the hills a half-hour’s ride from town. The journey is quick, but for all their careful planning the sun is even quicker. It’s been warm out since they arrived, and only growing warmer by the minute, and Marianne can feel the back of her neck already beginning to prickle.

The wyverns, however, seem to welcome the heat. Nader’s prize mount Yara and her two sisters are all to brood this summer, reclining in the long grass, stretching and folding their wings for little more than the pleasure of the sensation. Their nests are broad, shallow burrows scratched into the hillside, insulated from within with twigs and leaves, but open to the air. One might imagine you could build a fire in them. Peculiar and wonderful things.

Nader tips the egg into Marianne’s lap, and she gasps, closing her arms around it on instinct to prevent it from rolling off. “Are you sure this is—”

“Safe? ‘Course.” He knocks soundly on the shell once, twice, three times to demonstrate. “See? Good strong shell.”

“Nader, please,” she says, partly warning, partly pleading—but it’s ultimately without reproach, and he knows it. The egg sits so heavily in her lap it’s entirely mistakable for a large stone, and the outer shell is smooth and hard as a block of unmarked marble, such that she can hardly imagine something living inside it, waiting to struggle its way out. “When will they hatch?”

“On a hotter day than this. Likely around midsummer, the longest days of the year.” Nader peers up at the sky, one hand up to shade his eyes, as if he means to judge the sun’s intensity by sight alone. “Though once in a while you’ll get a clutch that hatches out of season. Without enough sunlight, they come out small and all washed out, like little Buttercup—then they stand out too much, especially in the mountains.”

It does not come naturally to Marianne, still, to think of Buttercup as small. She had noticed the discrepancy, of course, in the army, the first time she saw Buttercup in flight with the rest of the Immortal Corps—the body just a bit thinner than average, the wings just a bit narrower. But it had never registered as smallness, not truly, not for a creature who seemed able to command the clouds. It’s only thinking about it now, cradling this yet-unhatched egg on her knees in the dirt, that she can imagine what that smallness must mean out in the wild, what it must be like to be born into a world you need to fight to belong in. At its heart, she knows, the feeling is not unfamiliar. She knows how hard it can be to live, when you stand out too much.

“Survival must be difficult for them, then.” The thought grieves her a little, though she has no wish to give any sort of language to the reasons why. The feeling itself is enough, tangling between her ribs, pricking at all the places beneath the skin that have never ceased to be tender. She bites her lip, slows her breathing; gradually, it dissipates. “Because they aren’t supposed to exist, really, but they do.”

“They’ve got much better chances in captivity, to be sure,” Nader agrees, frankly, without pretense. He’s looking at her straight on, eyes level on her face with just the sort of attention that she would have wanted immediately to retreat from, in a different life. “And if you treat ‘em right, and don’t give up on ‘em, they’re the truest fliers you’ll ever know. The smoothest, and the fastest, and the most devoted. You can stake your life on that.”

In this life, Marianne finds herself already looking back, steady. And then she smiles. “Is that so?”

* * *

Marianne carries parts of the war years around in her body, lodged in the flesh like splinters. Invisible, now, in the places where she’s healed around them. But from time to time they make themselves known to her, sharply: the memory of a forest, a field, an underground city; the smell of iron, and the earth under her knees, so dark and so wet. Her hands, pressed to the bleeding chest of a body without a face. Her hands, and a handful of words, and between her fingers an erratic shudder of light.

Claude is the same way. They rarely talk about it, these days, but she knows what it is that wakes him up in the middle of the night and brings him down to her little room in the west wing, moving without needing to see, reaching out for her in the darkness. Even the way he breathes afterward, when she moves her palms along his skin, questing for a heartbeat. Even that tells her, _I remember._

There is so much Marianne remembers. Some nights she visits it all again, while Claude sleeps and she listens to the distant rumbling of the summer thunderstorms, brewing out over the desert. That first vision of Garreg Mach in ruins, and their old class beginning to rebuild it all by hand, brick by cracked brick. How she had left the dining hall after supper with an apple in her pocket for Dorte and found Claude out behind the stables, unsaddling Buttercup. Claude without even a cape in the dead of winter, standing under the torches with his white wyvern, glowing.

“Hey there,” he said, without ceremony, glancing at her sidelong. He’d been holding Buttercup’s head, Marianne remembers, cradling it in his palms. “Say good evening, Buttercup, my love. Good evening to our friend Marianne.”

The wyvern’s eyes had settled on Marianne’s face, as if she’d recognized the name, and she’d made a chirping sound, low in the throat. And maybe it was the sheer incongruousness of being greeted this way, by something so fierce and so gentle at once, that heartened her just enough to speak.

“Is it…” Claude inclined his head attentively in her direction, and for a moment she lost the question. “Is it yours?”

“Oh, yes. Off you go now, darling,” he said to Buttercup, and bent his head to kiss her on the nose. His eyes stayed with her as she spread her wings and took off in the direction of the Goddess Tower, and so Marianne’s had, also, until she was out of sight. “I raised her from an egg. Fed her from my own plate, taught her how to take a saddle, everything.”

Under her cloak, Marianne folded her arms. She hesitated a moment before approaching, coming forward into the torchlight. “I didn’t know. When we were at school, you never said you liked to fly.”

“My best-kept secret, probably,” said Claude, turning to her with a grin. “She was more than sore with me, as you might imagine, for leaving her to come here, all those years ago. A whole year and then some gone, Marianne. Unforgivable. I was buttering her up for days.” He pitched his voice high, theatrical, puppeteering one hand like a mouth as he spoke. “‘But, dearest, every day I was away I thought of you,’ I said. Every day. I’d stake my life on it!”

Marianne stared at him, bewildered, and then she laughed. Such a misplaced sound for a winter night in wartime, so sweet and strange she almost did not recognize it—not until she felt it, feathering in the hollow of her stomach, warming her up from within. “I’m glad your sincerity seems to have moved her heart, Claude.”

“She’s certainly made me work for it.” It was Claude, now, who stepped a little closer. Claude who bent his head to peer at her face beneath her hood, so intently that Marianne wondered for a moment if he meant to push it back and reveal her, but he didn’t. “But that’s the trouble, isn’t it, when you take a living thing into your care? By the end…”

“By the end?”

At the time, Marianne had forgotten the particular texture of Claude’s silences. It broke upon her gradually as he stood there, weighing up the words he had meant to say, looking into her eyes—and then she remembered.

“By the end,” he said at last, “you belong to it, just as much as it belongs to you.” And then, more softly, in the sort of voice you use for secrets, “Don’t you, Marianne?”

And maybe she had remembered something else then, too: what day it was, and what had called her to return there. Maybe her answer to his question—maybe the only answer to any question that mattered, surfacing unbidden from the chambers of the heart, suddenly and unerringly truthful—had always just been _Yes. Yes, it’s true._

* * *

“You still burn so easily,” Lady Tiana von Riegan says on Sunday evening, as Marianne dips a foot into the bath. “I see you weren’t joking when you told me you were unused to the sun.”

The bath is cool today; Marianne can feel the spells that make it so painted into the tile, humming against the soles of her feet. It’s only one of many things that never fail to startle her, in that moment of first contact between skin and water—the magic, and with it the unseasonal temperature, and the ripples that grow across the surface of the still pool as she lowers her body down. Once in a while it still crosses her mind that perhaps she ought to apologize for disturbing it with her presence, but then the very water she’s displaced seems to close back in to embrace her, and the urge passes.

There’s another, more persistent apology on the tip of her tongue now. Tiana must see it coming, interrupts it with a laugh. She shifts away from her comfortable place by the wall and comes to sit next to Marianne, shoulder to shoulder. “It’s not a criticism, my dear. Does it hurt?”

Lady Tiana von Riegan, former queen of Almyra, wears her black hair cropped at the nape like a soldier. She likes to take her evening baths unassisted, without the customary entourage of servants, but welcomes company and conversation. She’s famously plainspoken in both Almyran and the Common Tongue—and near-impossible to lie to in either, though Marianne’s never had a reason to test this claim.

“Not too much,” she murmurs, folding her knees up close to her chest. Out of the corner of the eye she can see the ends of her unbound hair trailing in the water, featherlike. “It stings for a day or so, and then settles down. I take a little honey to soothe it, and ice.”

“Good girl. Let me see your neck.” The command is brisk, belying the light hand that moves the curtain of Marianne’s hair aside, skims the raw and tender skin underneath with only the fingertips. “Peeling already. I was like you, you know. My first few weeks here, I burned right up.”

Near-involuntarily, Marianne wrinkles her nose. She can’t see it from here, but she knows there must be a little burning there too, across the bridge and over the cheekbones. “Did you, milady?”

“Certainly. Like dry grass in summertime. The sun just shines different, this side of the Throat; there’s nothing, really, that can prepare you for it until you’re in it.” Tiana’s hand squeezes her shoulder once, almost fondly, and retreats. Beside her, Marianne can hear the tinkling of an oil bottle being unstoppered, a soft splashing; soon after, she smells lavender. “Still, I got used to it. Shed the old skin, grew new skin in its place, less delicate than what came before.”

New skin, new tissue. New muscle, knitting itself into being over bone. Marianne remembers memorizing words for that. Under the water, she opens her hands, inspects the latticework of spell-scars that once covered them from wrist to fingertips. Fading, already fading.

“What was it like for you?” she asks. “In the beginning?”

Lady Tiana, once of House Riegan, is herself not without scars. There is one just below her collarbone, pale and crescent-shaped, that looks like an arrowhead had been cut out of it a long time ago. It shows itself clear when she tips her head back to look at the ceiling, as though searching it for an answer that will untangle everything else.

“When I came here, I was much younger than you are now,” she says eventually. “Much more foolish, too. I loved someone, and I knew I wanted to love the world in which he lived. More than that, I wanted to earn its love in return.” Turning to Marianne, she smiles. “You can imagine how little I knew at the time about what that would entail.”

“You didn’t want to be a queen, then,” says Marianne. “At least, not in the beginning.”

Tiana shakes her head. “I was hardly thinking that far ahead. All I wanted was a place to be myself, and when I could not find that place, I carved it out. Sometimes painfully. Just one small day at a time, the way the wind wears away at the mountains.” Then, quietly, possibly more quietly than Marianne’s ever heard her say anything, she asks, “Do you know that story?”

Marianne lowers her eyes, then, and looks down at her reflection—her face, and Tiana’s, and all the delicate places where the lines shimmer and blur together before dispersing.

“I do,” she says. “Khalid told it to me.”

* * *

“A copper for your thoughts, Marianne,” Claude says, a little sleepily. Above his head, Marianne can see the dark of her room already beginning to pale, revealing the pointed outline of one bedpost, the dip of the canopy. “If they’re big, I’ll even make it a gold piece.”

“I…” she begins. For a moment, nothing follows. She’s gathered into his side, and her head is against his chest—and, tenderly against the shell of her ear, there is his heart beating. “I want to ask you something.”

Today is Sunday again. In an hour or so, she knows, it will be bright enough for her to see Claude rise from her bed, bid her goodbye for now with a kiss, and exit through the balcony, like something out of an old song. But that’s later, Claude’s hands remind her, fingers along her spine as though there’s music they might draw out of her body with the right touch, the right sequence of breaths. Later.

“You say that like you don’t already know you can,” he murmurs, and there’s a smile in his voice as he does. “Ask.”

Still listening, Marianne considers her question. She considers the smell of grass, and the sound of horses running, and the blossoms on the wayfarer tree—considers the shadowy shapes of things that fly, lit from behind by the sun. She considers a handful of words in one language, and then another.

At last, she asks, “What is the word for love, Khalid?”

Claude breathes in, releases it slow. For a moment, just a moment, Marianne hears wings—quickening, quickening.

“Come here,” he says, and draws her closer. “Let me tell you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I am on [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/strikinglight_)


End file.
